The Creation Of Collective RTL
I’m starting The RTL Collective as a way to try and advance open source hardware to a level that is easier for everyone to use and contribute. I’m working on it in my ‘spare’ time so it’ll be constantly evloving and updating. I typically like to do things in a way where only polished results are shown, but this is one of those things that I hope will help people even as it is evolving. I’ll do bits as I can and update these blog pages as things change so that my direction is clear.
Please feel free to comment and help with the collective direction and my understanding. I’m not a design engineer by day, rather I’m an IC validation engineer. Validation is not verification it is the bring-up and validation of initial silicon. My job includes developing software to exercise the hardware, developing scripts and software to control test equipment used during the validation, and working with the design team(s) to workaround problems that are discovered. Other duties also include reviewing architectural and implementation specific documentation, and in some cases to examine RTL in order to create targeted testing and to develop mechanisms to execute those tests.
The open source software movement has taken on some epic problems and create some very capable and competitive software. After having worked along side various hardware, firmware, and driver teams I’ve learned that a little bit of effort in the right places can go a long way to helping the next team pickup and be productive where you leave off.
The open source software world has a huge number of libraries that make some of the most difficult tasks easier. Graphic User Interface libraries, compilers, standard libraries, artificial intelligence, and the list goes on and on. Collective RTL is being created to be a library of free and open source hardware cores.
Interested in helping? Do you or your company have a solid core reuse standard? The first step of the RTL Collecitve is to devise a standard that allows for quick adoption of compliant cores, so any assistance in creating that standard would be great to have! In my next post I’ll talk a little about the development of a hardware source standard for the library. github-public@collectivertl.org